What Daphne Caruana Galizia wrote remains relevant even today, ADPD leadership said on Saturday as it marked six years since her assassination.
"We ended up in a country with first class and second class citizens where money is the measure between the two. Meritocracy is dead, buried and forgotten and people have lost faith that one day we will see a spark of justice where everyone is considered the same and given the same opportunities," said Sandra Gauci, chairperson of ADPD – the Green Party.
Gauci said that Caruana Galizia’s revelations had proven to be a Pandora’s box that unleashed a chain of scandals so regular that people have made people give up on politicians and parliament.
"There is a critical need to put capable people, rather than friends of friends in key positions. Mediocre leadership is leading to chaos with citizens being robbed twice over with their taxes being used either for the wrong purposes or to fund appointments granted on anything but merit. Let's not allow Daphne's death to be in vain," Gauci said.
Caruana Galizia was killed in October 2017 in a car bomb attack that caused shockwaves across the globe. In the years before her murder, she blogged consistently about multiple scandals involving the Labour government – from the Panama Papers to the sale of passports, privatisation of state hospitals and decision to award Electrogas a contract to build and run a gas-fired power station.
ADPD Deputy Secretary General Mario Mallia emphasised the seriousness of two scandals exposed in the past weeks by Times of Malta: the first concerns abuse of a disability benefit system through a fraud scheme allegedly involving a former Labour MP, the second about a top Transport Malta official being bombarded with political requests to ‘help’ specific candidates obtain a driving licence.
Mallia expressed concern that police have only pressed charges against individual recipients in the benefit racket.
While it was good that fraudsters were being charged and ordered to return stolen money, “the state has to show its mettle with the big fish too,” Mallia said, arguing that resignations were in order.
The ADPD official was less impressed by Robert Abela’s response to a driving licence racket.
"We are citizens in a country where everyone is supposed to be the same before the law and everyone should be given the same opportunities. But Abela institutionalized and gave his blessing to a culture of friends of friends, making it an essential part of his leadership. He never showed any contrition or ever offered the nation an apology. On the contrary, he kept coming to the defence and apologizing for those who have been pigging out with his blessing,” Mallia said.
Mallia contrasted the prime minister’s actions to his claim that he is driven by socialist principles, made last week during Labour’s general conference.
“What kind of socialism is this that promotes a system that serves the insider rather than serving citizens with a sense of justice? The Prime Minister seems to have not yet understood that his duty as Prime Minister is towards everyone and not just towards party hacks. Instead of going on the defensive and considering criticism as an ‘attack’, his job is to fix the flaws of an outdated, dishonest and unfair system,” Mallia said. “This would be the smartest way to honour Daphne's memory".